Billionaire investment guru Ray Dalio warns of a looming capital war between the US and China

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Ray Dalio is warning that the current trade war between the US and China could spiral into a capital war. 

“There is a trade war, there is a technology war, there is a geopolitical war, and there could be a capital war,” Dalio said on Thursday, adding “How that is approached is going to determine our futures.”

The billionaire investor and founder of Bridgewater Associates, which oversees $160 billion in assets, spoke at a gala hosted by the National Committee on US-China Relations in New York — a non-partisan group founded to push cooperation between the two nations.

“My responsibility as a global economic investor is to find the elements that make countries succeed and fail, and to quantify those indicators,” he said, according to the committee’s tweets from the event.

“I hope that it is done with mutual understanding instead of wars – a win-win relationship rather than a lose-lose relationship,” Dalio added. 

The comments come amid escalating trade war negotiations and after Bloomberg in September reported that the White House was weighing moves to limit US investment in Chinese firms, which would possibly include delisting Chinese companies from US stock exchanges and stemming government pension flows into Chinese investments.  

Dalio has warned of similar dangers in the past: “There’s four kinds of war: there’s a trade war, a technology war, currency capital war, and a geopolitical war — and that’s a phenomenon happening at the same time, so internally we have a lot more conflicts,” Dalio told a panel in mid-October. 

Watch video of Dalio’s remarks, recorded by Bloomberg, here.